


You Are What You Love (Not Who Loves You)

by lusilly



Series: Earth-28 [22]
Category: DCU, DCU (Comics), Teen Titans (Comics)
Genre: Gender Issues, Genderfluid Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-24
Updated: 2015-01-24
Packaged: 2018-03-08 20:49:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3222998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lusilly/pseuds/lusilly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lian is launching her new fashion line, and she hates Damian but also he's like unreasonably hot, so she brings him in to model.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Are What You Love (Not Who Loves You)

**Author's Note:**

> Part of Earth-28 canon. This happens a while after "Fiat iusticia"; Lian and Damian are living together in California. They're in their early 20s. Damian is in the midst of exploring his non-cisness. (In E28 Damian is bigender altho for most of his life he prefers he/him pronouns.)
> 
> Title obviously inspired by "Save Rock and Roll" by Fall Out Boy.
> 
> Damian's solo shots are inspired by this photoset: http://iloveeverythingwaytoomuch.tumblr.com/post/105397360905

            “You know,” said Damian, sitting before a mirror, being groomed, “you could’ve hired actual models for this.”

            “Why would I do that when I have you?” Lian replied absently, combing his hair back intently, scrutinizing the style in the mirror. “The editorial is about me, not my designs, so I’d rather have you here than somebody random, no matter how much prettier than you they might be.”

            The small smile on her face was, as always, harmlessly venomous, like a cobra deliberately choosing not to strike. It was such an effortless expression of her feelings for him that he always felt both reassured and vaguely unsettled when she looked at him like that: both that she felt for him with such intensity and also that she could express it so easily, so openly, without reservations. He envied her, but envy did not alarm him, because he knew that it came from admiration, and he knew that admiration came from love.

            “Plus,” Lian added pointedly, meeting his dark gaze in the mirror, “I used your measurements for half of my designs anyway so you are, literally, the best fit.” With a grin, she smacked his shoulders and said: “Go-time, big boy.”

            Damian had once theorized to Lian that the reason, he suspected, that she was so guilty of enforcing the gender binary with little microaggressions like her very favorite degradation, “ _big boy_ ,” was because of the heavily gendered environment in which her father raised her: Father and Daughter, Male and Female, two opposite ends of a spectrum. “Who knows?” he’d speculated, over reheated Indian takeout. “You try so hard to break traditional gender boundaries, and yet you cling so tightly to other aspects of femininity. Maybe you’ve always been trying to be the son you know your father wanted but which at heart you know you cannot be.” Lian had humored him right up to, “Think about it, you are the textbook case of the Electra complex, right down to castration anxiety leading to homosexuality,” at which point she had flung a spoonful of lamb vindaloo at him and replied, “Let’s not play Freud with each other, Damian, because we both know you _really_ lose this game.”

             The shoot was for a relatively well-known fashion magazine, announcing the launch of Lian Harper’s official fashion collection – titled _Arsenal_ , which Damian had wrinkled his nose at disapprovingly; “Heavy-handed as ever, my sweet,” he grumbled, but he hadn’t complained too much – it was, after all, his fault that her identity had been compromised in the first place. Instead of shying away from the public eye like he had done following that cataclysmic press conference in Gotham City, Lian had decided to embrace her identities, all of them, as she always had.

            In the interview preceding the photoshoot, Lian had explained the title of her collection to the interviewer while Damian sat back beside her, jasmine pearl tea in hand. “Because it’s powerful,” she said. “Because there are lots of people out there who can't arm themselves with anything more than what’s in their head and what’s on their body, and I want to empower them to do so with clothes that make them feel they could command an army, or lead a nation.”

            From behind her, Damian nodded wisely, thinking he understood. “Weaponized femininity,” he said wisely.

            Dissatisfied with that, she did not glance back at him. “No,” she said. “I don’t believe that it’s weaponry that makes us powerful. An arsenal is a bank from which you can draw strength. It is so much more than high heels sharp enough to kill a man.”

             There was, in fact, one pair of shoes in Lian’s collection crafted with a tip so sharp that it could, with enough force behind the kick, puncture a lung, or slice through a throat. Damian was listed as a collaborator on that particular pair, mostly because of late-night arguments about which was more important, the structural design of the point or the distribution weight behind it.

            Lian wore, as she was wont to do, red. In admiration, Damian stood behind the camera and watched her pose, graceful and dexterous. Surely the photography staff didn’t notice how she kept slipping instinctually into combat-ready poses, elbows drawn in, knees bent ever so slightly, one shoulder drawn back as if pulling a punch or drawing back the string of a bow. He watched her with envy, the gown she wore clasping her body tightly, decoratively, naturally; he wondered for not the first time what it felt like, being Lian, being so effortless, wearing her dresses and knowing exactly who she is and what she wants.

            The photographer sent Damian in. “Once,” he said to Lian, her lipstick red as a poison apple, “my mother tried to get a family photoshoot in Vanity Fair.”

            Lian laughed, taking hold of the jacket he wore, then adjusting his collar. “What happened?”

            “She was unsuccessful,” he said, a glint of amusement in his eye, “obviously.”

             It went smoothly at first, until the photographer said they were feeling a Red Riding Hood theme and wanted Damian to channel the Big Bad Wolf, at which Damian stopped and point-blank refused to participate. “Whatever,” said Lian, turning back to the camera. “Let him throw his tantrum, this is about me anyway,” which was a very Lian thing to say, and made Damian feel a little better.

            Later, to show off a range of Lian’s designs, they took some solo shots of Damian. Lian heckled him from behind the camera. “Ay, demon baby, don’t give me any of that doe-eyed bullshit. More butch. Give me manly-man.”

            “Lian,” he called back at her, with a glare (the photographer snapped a picture right as his face turned severe, and a beautiful picture it was indeed). “First of all I don’t see _doe-eyed_ and _manly-man_ as mutually exclusive, and I want you to think very hard before you call me _butch_ again. I don’t know how many times I’ve told you that I won’t participate in a performative construction of gender – I need you to break the neural connections between images and perceptions of gender, particularly _my_ gender, and,” he pointed to the photographer, “you can absolutely quote me on that-”

            “Boo,” called Lian. “Nobody has time for your dissertation, Damian, just do the pose where you slouch a little bit and stick your chin up and look kinda confused – _yes_ , yeah, there we go. There we go, big boy.”

            “ _Lian_ -”

            “Now strip,” she said. “You’re making my clothes look bad in comparison to that cute little face of yours.”

            The photography team laughed, and Damian looked sullen but also a little flattered.

            Back at their apartment, Damian washed the makeup off his face. Lian passed him, hovered in the door of the bathroom, watching him. “I can do that for you every day if you want,” she said, as he dried his face on a towel. “But you’d have to shave the beard for me to work my true magic.”

            In the mirror, he looked at her standing there behind him. Again, she smiled, but this time it was drenched in honey and laced with sincerity, claws sheathed. It was, even if she could not call it such, a peace offering; an apology; an “I don’t always understand, but I will try.”

            He ran his fingers across the stubble on his face. “That’s all right,” he said. “I prefer the beard. But I do expect at least one pair of those razor stilettos in my size, you know.”

            “Done.”

            For a moment, she didn’t move from her spot at the door.

            Then she said, “I only offered because the beard has got to go, Damian. It is truly fucking terrible,” and she left her spot on the threshold.

            Alone in the bathroom, Damian looked up and met his own dark eyes in the mirror. His reflection practiced her smile, and in his belly he felt the familiar swell of envy at the ease with which she allowed him a glimpse into her self. A smile: gentle, loving, wordless, painless. He thought of the way she spoke to him, always biting her tongue and turning sharp before she got too close, drawing his blood in order to avoid spilling her own.

            It occurred to him then for the first time that maybe it was not so easy for her, after all.


End file.
